by reason for retraction – Page 13

Exclusive: Author threatened to sue publisher over retraction, then sued to block release of emails

An education researcher who had four papers flagged for plagiarism and citation issues threatened to sue the publisher and editors who decided to retract one of the articles, Retraction Watch has learned.

We obtained the emails containing legal threats by Constance Iloh, formerly an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine, through a public records request. Iloh, who was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30” top figures in education in 2016 and briefly taught at Azusa Pacific University after leaving Irvine, sued to prevent the university from giving us the emails, but after a two-year legal battle, a state appeals court affirmed the records should be released. That battle is described in more detail in this post.

Following our reporting in August 2020 on the retraction of one of Iloh’s articles for plagiarism, the disappearance of another, and the correction of two more, we requested post-publication correspondence between UCI, Iloh, and the journals where the papers had appeared.

The emails UCI released to us in May of this year shed light on the processes three journals took after concerns were raised about Iloh’s work, and how she responded.

Our two-year fight for the release of public records

In September 2020, we requested records from the University of California, Irvine, regarding four papers by an assistant professor of education that had been retracted, corrected, or taken down.

The retraction and correction notices for the articles, written by Constance Iloh, mentioned plagiarism and misuse of references. After our initial reporting, we wanted to see if we could learn more about what happened.

It took approximately two and a half years for us to obtain the records, detailed in this post. The emails we obtained shed light on the processes three journals took after concerns were raised about Iloh’s work, and how she responded – including with legal threats.

Here, we tell the story of how we fought in court to get the records, represented by Kelly Aviles, who specializes in cases involving the California Public Records Act and has successfully sued on behalf of the Los Angeles Times.

One year later, bioinformatics journal with unclear leadership yet to retract plagiarized article

Nicki Tiffin

On Aug. 17, 2022, Nicki Tiffin received a notification that she had published a new study. The problem? She had never submitted an article to the journal in which the paper appeared.

A year later, despite efforts by Tiffin and others, the journal has not responded to retraction requests, and the article remains online. Further investigation by Retraction Watch has revealed other dysfunction at the journal, including falsely representing its editors and a schism from its founders and original sponsor.

The article, “Triumphs and improvement of Computational Bioinformatics in South Africa,” was published in June 2022 in the European Journal of Biomedical Informatics (EJBI).

Tiffin, a professor at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape, discovered that the new paper was a plagiarized version of an article she had published in 2016. That paper, “The Development of Computational Biology in South Africa: Successes Achieved and Lessons Learnt,” appeared in the journal PLOS Computational Biology and has been cited 13 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.

In 2016, Tiffin was a professor at the University of Cape Town. Although she had no role in publishing the EJBI article, it lists her name as the sole author of the paper, as well as her University of Cape Town affiliation.

Weill Cornell cancer researchers committed research misconduct, feds say

Two cancer researchers who formerly worked at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City published 12 papers with fake data that amounts to research misconduct, according to findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

ORI found that Andrew Dannenberg “engaged in research misconduct by recklessly reporting falsified and/or fabricated data” in the papers, and Kotha Subbaramaiah “reused Western blot images from the same source and falsely relabeled them to represent different proteins and/or experimental results.”

The published findings for both scientists include the same extensive list of duplicated images in a dozen papers, all retracted.

Eight papers retracted after author found to be fictional

Elsevier journals are retracting eight studies after learning that one of the authors on the papers was “fictitious” – as in a similar case we reported on recently.

The ostensible author, Toshiyuki Bangi, was listed as affiliated with the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The eight studies, which were cited a collective 47 times, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science, were published in three different journals — Construction and Building Materials, the Journal of Building Engineering, and Case Studies in Construction Materials.

The retraction notice is the same for each paper, and states:

Withdrawn AI-written preprint on millipedes resurfaces, causing alarm

A preprint about millipedes that was written using OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT is back online after being withdrawn for including made-up references, Retraction Watch has learned.

The paper, fake references and all, is also under review by a journal specializing in tropical insects.

“This undermines trust in the scientific literature,” said Henrik Enghoff, a millipede researcher at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, in Copenhagen, who first spotted problems with the preprint, as we reported last month.

Researcher sues U.S. government following debarment, misconduct finding

A former researcher at the University of Utah has filed for a temporary restraining order against the U.S. government agency that last week barred her from receiving federal funds.

Ivana Frech – formerly Ivana De Domenico – “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating” images in three different papers whose work was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). ORI barred Frech from receiving federal funding for three years starting on August 21, making no mention of whether she agreed to the sanctions.

But on August 29, Jackson Nichols, an attorney representing Frech, filed for a temporary restraining order against the Department of Health and Human Services. The complaint in the case is under seal, and the summons refer only to a “suit to enjoin further action by U.S. government agency” under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Neither Nichols nor Frech immediately responded to Retraction Watch’s request for comment about the goals of the lawsuit, but the filing is consistent with others aimed at blocking such debarments.

The case dates back to at least 2012, when Frech and colleagues retracted two papers from Cell Metabolism. As we reported at the time, Jerry Kaplan, the senior author of those papers, said “the data were lost when an employee, who was dismissed, discarded lab notebooks without permission.” That employee – who was not a co-author of the paper – was a technician, Kaplan said. “This occurred prior to the identification of errors in the manuscripts and was reported at that time to the University authorities.”

‘Unethical and misleading’: Researcher finds his name on editorial boards of journals he’s never heard of

On July 21, Derek Woollins received an email asking that an article be withdrawn from a journal he supposedly helped edit.

But although Woollins was listed on the journal’s website as a member of its editorial board, he had never even heard of the publication.

Woollins, a professor of synthetic chemistry at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, later learned that he is also listed on the editorial board of other journals from the same publisher – Scholars Research Library – again, with no involvement in any of them. (Some academics have even found themselves listed as editors in chief of journals they have nothing to do with.)

Woollins told us:

Former Alabama chemistry prof faked data in grant applications: Federal watchdog

A former chemistry professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville admitted to reusing data in grant applications to the National Institutes of Health while claiming that it came from different experiments, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Surangi (Suranji) Jayawardena, who joined the UAH faculty in 2017 following a postdoc at MIT, “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data in twelve (12) figure panels” in four grant applications in 2018 and 2019, the ORI said. All of the applications were administratively withdrawn by the agency, one in 2019 and three in 2021.

Jayawardena studied ways to rapidly diagnose tuberculosis, and to deliver drugs to treat various bacteria. She does not appear to have had any papers retracted.

Who are you, Dragan Rodriguez? Fifteen studies have the same fake author, sleuth finds

Talk about artificial intelligence. Fifteen studies published in various journals name a mysterious computer scientist as an author.

The problem? He doesn’t seem to exist.

Dragan Rodriguez is listed as being affiliated with Case Western Reserve University, but an official at the Cleveland institution told a sleuth no one of that name has been associated with the university.

The studies on which Rodriguez’s name appears range in topic from cancer detection to “renewable energy systems optimization.” The papers were published since 2018 in 10 journals from four major scientific publishers since 2018, including the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy and the Journal of Building Engineering, which have both historically had impact factors above 7, and Applied Energy, whose impact factor has been above 11. They have been cited a total of 232 times.

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